Ruth Marcus (Washington Post); Rick Perry is no George W. Bush. This is not a compliment … his 2010 Tea Party-steeped manifesto, “Fed Up!,” makes George Bush look like George McGovern. Perry has said he wasn’t planning to run for president when he wrote the book, and it shows:

● He floats the notion of repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. Perry describes the amendment as “the great milestone on the road to serfdom” because it “was the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States.”….

●He lambastes the 17th Amendment, which instituted direct election of senators, as a misguided “blow to the ability of states to exert influence on the federal government”….

● He laments the New Deal as “the second big step” – the 16th and 17th amendments being the first – “in the march of socialism and….”

● He specifically targets Social Security for “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government”….

● … he is even less happy about the Great Society, suggesting that programs such as Medicare are unconstitutional….

…. Perry’s views on the role of judges may be the most alarming given a president’s ability to shape the Supreme Court for decades to come. He writes about the current court with venomous disdain …. Disagreeing with liberal justices is one thing. Accusing them of not caring about the Constitution is like denouncing the opposing party as unpatriotic …

…. The subtitle of Perry’s book is “Our Fight to Save America from Washington.” Reading it summons the image of another, urgent fight: saving America from Rick Perry.

Politicususa: Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell’s book signing in Republican Naples, Florida drew a total of five people. Five. Five people. That’s it. Just like a Sarah Palin event, the media outnumbered the actual attendees.

Alex Pareene (Salon): Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell. Olive Tree Ministries … is obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

“…in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said otherwise, I don’t know.”

….So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

….in 2006 she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope….

…In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Update: Interesting – the graphic now appears to have been removed from the site (well, I can’t see it anyway). The new headline story? Yep, you guessed it, it’s about the half-termer meeting the Chump.

CNN: Potential GOP candidate Herman Cain has indicated that he will formally announce he will run for president at an event to be held in two weeks. And despite many political observers dismissing him as a potential challenger, his campaign’s communications director told CNN on Saturday, “We are running an operation because we are first-tier. We’re serious.”

….In January, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza was the first Republican to officially form a presidential exploratory committee. Cain won the Tea Party live straw poll at a summit in Phoenix in February and has since courted potential supporters in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, among other stops around the country.

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Thanks Gail 😉

I love the line “We are running an operation because we are first-tier” …. you’d hate to see the GOP’s second tier 😯

Remember the creature known as Joe Miller? The Teabagger was so certain he’d win Alaska’s Senate race last year he took to Twitter….

…and then he lost to Lisa Murkowski.

He had planned on running again …. err, good luck with that Tea Bag Joe:

GOPolitico: If Joe Miller is thinking about another political race in Alaska, he’s got considerable work to do repairing his image. That’s according to the state’s premier pollster, Dave Dittman, who is set to release numbers this week that show the former Senate candidate’s approval rating in the tank.

An AlaskaPoll taken in March found that 73 percent of Alaskans view Miller unfavorably, including 53 percent who put themselves in the “very unfavorable” category.

That leaves just 18 percent who view Miller in a favorable fashion. Nine percent are undecided.

On the other hand, residents appear to be content with their current delegation. All three members receive high “excellent or good” approval ratings – with Democratic Sen. Mark Begich at 57 percent, GOP Rep. Don Young at 63 percent and GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski at a sparkling 71 percent.